Wisconsin: “Ground Zero” for Public Employee Unions?

Hardly. At least not until Jesse Jackson showed up in Madison, the capital of Wisconsin, to join the ranks of protesting teachers who congregated both inside and outside of that state’s capitol building.

With his usual flair for over-dramatizing a situation, Jackson stood in the middle of a crowd – before a TV mike – and declared Madison to be “Ground Zero” for the union cause.

The term “Ground Zero” is an expression that should be reserved for cataclysmic events, after which few people are left standing or alive. If Jackson doubts that, he should reflect upon the disaster which befell the occupants of the World Trade Towers on 9/11.

That location was, in fact, “Ground Zero.”

The average salary and benefits package for Wisconsin teachers, as independently verified by CQ Press. (Image Credit, Fox News, 2/18/2011.)

The lobbying and legislative battle being waged between the Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker; the Wisconsin Education Association Council; and the Republican-controlled State Legislature, may be about to reshape the entire landscape and structure of the teachers’ union in that state.

It didn’t have to happen that way:

When Walker first proposed his plans for reform, the entire covey of fourteen Wisconsin Democrat Senators fled the state and crossed the border into Illinois for a self-imposed exile: It was an attempt to stymie the legislative process.

The average pay and benefits package for "The Rest of Us." Data source: USA Today. (Image Credit, Fox News, 2/18/2011.)

Their strategy, they believed, was that Walker could do nothing because he would be one senator short of a quorum. A quorum is the minimum amount of legislators required by law to conduct debate and to approve bills.

But the Republicans discovered that they could get around the problem of delinquent senators with a procedural move that permitted the Wisconsin Legislature to bypass the quorum quandary.

Walker had previously offered to keep collective bargaining in force for educators in the Wisconsin Education Association Council, with only two exceptions: Sick leave and vacation rights. WEAC leadership refused his last and best offer, one that would have resolved the collective bargaining impasse.